Siding with small businesses is like siding with cupcakes, low humidity or Motown singles: you're siding with unassailable goodness, friend. If you support small businesses, you support the American ethos, or at least the historically overcelebrated, clich version of it. Nobody has a problem with small businesses, not even the I-see-threats-to-shark-tank-capitalism-everywhere-including-but-not-limited-to-in-my-utility-shed-and-on-Etsy crowd.

Fatherhood has enriched my life in so many ways that I can't begin to enumerate them, but it has hamstrung me as a writer/observer/whatever it is that I do. Any work conversation that includes the phrase "hey, how's the kid doing?" inevitably ends on a sunny note, even if it began with accusations of anti-Semitism and influence-peddling. I can't view marketing content as I once did, either. Take that infamous Infiniti ad from earlier this year: Where I once might've been intrigued by its focus on a single feature, it now prompts me to jump off the couch and scream, ...

Of all the peripheral foodstuffs on the Thanksgiving table, cranberries get the least respect. They're both underserved and underrated -- the Bill Wyman to the turkey's Mick Jagger, the "Star Wars Episode VI" to stuffing's "Star Wars Episode V." Imagine their fate if they weren't so darn yummy, appealingly gelatinous and appropriately sized for purposes of dinner-plate tectonics.

Had I known it existed, I almost certainly would've reviewed "Random Acts of Fusion," Ford's pave-the-interstate-with-smiles road trip of a video series, in this space. I'm sure I would've had something to say about Joel McHale's aggressive deadpan and about our collective surrender to Ryan Seacrest's disarming okay-ness. I likely would've become the 3,600th Internet-writer-type person to fail miserably in an attempt to describe, encapsulate, characterize or otherwise qualify Kate Micucci's sublime adorability for the masses. The operative words there: Had I known it existed.

I dug the 1990s, unironically and without a trace of shame. I dug the music, the flash and especially the bombastic pastels. I dug all of this long after the decade expired. This goes a long way towards explaining why I was always single.

The athletic elite at my high school were an improbably evolved lot, especially by the standards of the day. They eschewed full-on brutishness for high-fives in the hall, "dude"-rich repartee and MGD-fueled Bon Jovi shout-alongs whenever the occasion presented itself (in the library, during memorial services, etc.). Many actually read at a 10th-grade level during 10th grade.

I don't know what you guys think about what happened on Tuesday night, but I think it's pretty frightening. It shows just how change-averse we've become, just how unwilling we are to abandon tried-and-discarded approaches in favor of novel thinking that inherently carries with it some risk. It exposes us as intellectually bankrupt, reliant on pat solutions and tired bromides proven ineffectual time and time again.

I told y'all about the time I proved that democracy works, right? It happened a bunch of years ago, when I was "between projects" and living back home with my parents. My mom, always active in local education, had a Tupac/Biggie-grade beef with one of the candidates for the Board of Education, possibly over an unsent thank-you note. To that end, she insisted I vote in an off-year election for her enemy's opponent, who may have been mentally ill or a member of Aryan Nations for all anyone knew.

On the list of traits I prize in an online provider of financial services and bank-like transactions, "quirky sense of humor" ranks right up there with "good at tennis" and "hair smells like lilacs." I don't want online financial entities with which I do business to make me chortle; I've got the delightful Tim Allen for that. No, what I want from those entities is a pledge that they'll grow my tiny pile of money into a slightly less tiny one, and that they'll do everything within their power to safeguard my personal info. I bring this up in the ...